Multidisciplinary tools for improving the efficacy of public prevention measures against smoking, obesity, alcohol and other threats to public health
This internship proposal is a product of a joint effort of two groups of the University of Murcia in a new multidisciplinary research line: Computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering group (Faculty of Computer), led by PhD. José Palma, and Neuroscience and Experimental Clinic group (Faculty of Medicine), led by MD, PhD. María Trinidad Herrero are trying to increase their expertise in this new field in order to address the new challenges in this new field at regional, national and international level.
To this end, the experience in the field of neuroscience of Professor Fabio Babiloni from the department of Physiology and Farmacology of the University of Roma Sapienza, international leading researcher in this field, will provide the required expertise to this new multidisciplinary collaboration between the groups led by PhD. José Palma and María Trinidad Herrero.
This collaboration is a direct result of the Infinite-salud regional network (funded by Fundación Seneca) that is composed of different groups from the field of medicine, computer science and engineering.
Project
The project to be carried out during this internship would like to integrate the use of the device for the measurement of the emotions, provided by the group leded by prof. Herrero. With such device it will be measured the reaction of the subjects investigated to the offering of different food package including healthy food, as well as the reaction of the subjects to the different Public Service Announcements (PSAs) related to the healthy food eventually produced by the Murcia region.
It will be the integration of neuroscientific insights and methodologies to generate and validate a set of software tools that can be used to inform Spanish and Murcia policymakers as to how to produce optimal PSAs that will have a substantial impact on encouragement of healthy life style choices for their citizens.
Opportunity
The project provides a unique opportunity to bring together academic and commercial experts at regional, national and international level working in the fields of EEG and consumer behaviour to evaluate marketing actions and messages.
Technological Breakthrough
The technological breakthrough is the exploitation of cross-disciplinary expertise to bring relevant multidisciplinary, including neuroscientific, results into a new marketing perspective, with the aim to evaluate and improve PSAs.
The project aims at generating, validating and providing a set of ICT tools to better evaluate the effectiveness of the PSAs for the Spanish and Murcia Ministers of Health and Social Affairs.
Concrete Objective
The concrete objective of the project will be to generate software applications (also based on WEB programs) and ¿white¿ documents in which the ¿rules¿ for more effective and higher cost-benefit PSAs will be described.
Such rules will be made available to the different communication managers and ministries of Spain as well as to the interested offices of the EU Commission and national and regional administrations.
Categories
- Smoking
- Food
- Alcohol
- Road Safety
Offer to Governments
In this project we would like to offer the Murcia and Spain governments ¿neuroscience based¿ tools to increase the efficacy of PSAs. Such tools will be based on cognitive, social and behavioural neuroscientific evidence published over the past few years by the groups involved in this proposal (leaded by Prof. Babiloni, Prof. Palma, Prof. Herrero) in high impact peer-reviewed scientific journals, and new data obtained in connection with this proposal.
Our approach will exploit neuro-electric imaging techniques during the presentation of PSAs in order to better understand the explicit and implicit cognitive and emotive processes that typify optimal PSAs.